Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are the currently popular flat panel displays. With the fast development in the recent decade, great improvements have been achieved in terms of screen size and display quality of LCDs. With the increasing production scale of LCDs, the competition among the manufacturers is becoming drastic. The manufacturers are trying to reduce the production cost while improving the quality of the LCD product, thus improving their competing power in the market.
At present, a mask exposure process is one of the necessary processes in the preparation of LCDs. The mask exposure process includes steps of below: transferring the pattern on the mask plate by means of exposure to the photosensitive photoresist layer prepared by processes of coating, drying under a low pressure, pre-baking etc, and so on; forming the photoresist layer into a mask pattern by means of processes of developing and post-baking; transferring the mask pattern to a structure layer by means of processes of etching and removing, thus completing the preparation of one layer of structure pattern. A LCD may be prepared by repeating the above steps several times.
However, preparing a LCD through mask exposure processes requires using mask plates, and the preparing of the molds involving extremely expensive cost makes the production cost of LCDs high; further, the modification to the plate is difficult when an error is happened in the design of the mask plate. In addition, the process of preparing photoresist layer requires steps of drying under a low pressure, pre-baking, developing and so on, and consumable stuffs such as developing liquid, compressed air, etc., are needed in these steps, which makes the production cost of the LCD increase.